Ammie, Come Home (12 page)

“…come…hooooome….”

Pat said something; it was rather a wordless snarl of anger than articulate profanity. There was a sharp snap, and the door, caught by the wind, crashed back against the wall. The three who stood below fled up the stairs and into the entryway. By that time Pat had the inner door open, and they plunged pell-mell into the warmth of the kitchen, and into a sudden glare of light as Pat found the switch by the door.

Bruce slammed the door shut, and they all stood blinking and gasping—all except Pat, who had not even paused. Huddled in his overcoat with his head retracted like a turtle's, he was plodding toward the room at the front of the house—the uninhabited room where something had shaken the drapes.

They stopped at the door of the dining room; no one cared to go any farther than that. Looking across the hallway and the foot of the stairs, they saw the living room, as calm and bright as any room could be. It was perhaps only Ruth's imagination that made her detect the faintest wisp of gray, no thicker than the smoke from a cigarette, lifting in a lazy coil…. The draperies hung insculptured folds, unmoving.

“Nothing there,” Bruce said. His hand touched the light switch in the dining room, and the chandelier blazed on. They stared at one another; and Pat put one big hand on Sara's shoulder where she stood clinging to the wall like a limp strand of ivy.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course she's all right,” Bruce snapped.

“Let her talk for once!”

“Stop it, both of you,” Ruth ordered. “We're all wound up like clocks, and no wonder. Bruce, what about that brandy now?”

“Best idea I've heard all evening.”

Ruth got the decanter from the side cabinet, and Bruce collected the glasses. Holding them by the stems, two in each hand, like big blown crystal flowers, he looked warily at Pat.

“We're going to have to go into that room sometime.”

“Brandy,” Ruth said hastily, and swallowed hers in one breath-snatching gulp.

Sara made a face as hers went down; brandy had never been one of her favorite drinks. But it restored some of the color to her cheeks, and Bruce promptly poured another inch of liquid all around.

“I needed that,” he admitted. “The place is really turned on tonight. I wonder how much of this activity is in response to what we're doing?”

“Who knows?” Pat muttered. “Who knows anything?”

They stared at one another in bemused silence for a time. Pat's eyes were glazed, and Ruth was conscious of an insidious, what-the-hell warmth that was the product of alcohol on an over-strained nervous system.

“Look here,” she said, a bit thickly, “we don't have to do this.”

“Do what?” Bruce asked.

“Stand around shaking in our shoes. If the trouble is in the house—then get rid of the house.”

“Ruth.” Sara held out her hand; her eyes were shining suspiciously. “You can't do that. You love this place.”

“My dear child, I'm not proposing a dramatic houseburning by midnight. For one thing, the neighbors might object. I can sell the place. It's worth a lot of money. You and I could go live in a nice apartment on Connecticut, or in Chevy Chase.”

“One objection,” Bruce said carefully. “You're ash—ashum—damn it!—assuming that my hypothesis is the right one. If Sara is schizoid she'll be schizoid wherever she is.”

“I don't believe in collective hallucinations,” Ruth said. “Sara didn't make that sound we heard tonight.”

“Not Sammie,” Pat said suddenly. “The name was not Sammie.”

It was the first sentence he had spoken since Ruth made her proposition, and its very irrelevance had an oddly calming effect. Sara dropped into a chair and rested her head on her folded arms. She looked sideways at Pat with round solemn eyes, like a pensive owl's; and Bruce's breath went out in a theatrical sigh.

“I hate to admit it,” he said, “but I was too
shook to notice details. What was the name, then?”

“Now who's being unscientific?” Pat said irritably. He rubbed his head, making his hair stand up like a crest, and scowled thoughtfully. “I don't know that it was a name. I do know that there was no ‘s' sound, that strong sibilant would have been unmistakable. Sara heard the words as ‘Sammie' because that is a familiar combination of sounds. Ruth heard the same thing because Sara had prepared her to hear it. To tell the truth, it sounded to me more like ‘mammy.'”

After a moment Ruth burst out laughing.

“I'm…sorry! Oh, dear! But, Pat—mammy? Shades of Al Jolson! Some poor old nursemaid, like the one in
Gone with the Wind?
And if you knew how funny you all look, standing around this table with your coats on, like visiting burglars….”

They waited respectfully until she had composed herself and dried her eyes. Then Pat remarked, “I'm glad I can supply some comic relief. As for your idea of selling the house—it has some merit, but we don't have to decide anything yet.”

“We?” Bruce repeated. He leaned on the table, arms stiff, and looked at the older man. “How do you feel about your theory now, Pat?”

Pat shrugged.

“Unlike Ruth, I do believe in collective hallucinations. Wait a minute—I'm not saying that was what happened tonight. Though both you and I, Bruce, heard that voice described…. You said forty-eight hours. You've still got twenty-four to go.”

LYING FLAT ON HER BACK
,
STARING UP AT THE CEILING
, Ruth heard the clock strike four. The clock stood on the landing, probably in the same position it had occupied since it was bought from Josiah Harper, Clockmaker, in 1836. Josiah had built well. The chimes echoed in silver clarity, precise as notes struck on a harpsichord.

As she had done a dozen times since they retired, Ruth raised herself cautiously on her elbow and looked over at Sara. It hadn't taken much persuasion to convince Sara to share her room that night. The room was lit by two rose-shaded lamps on the dressing table; Ruth wondered whether she would ever be able to sleep in a darkened room again.

Sara slept on her back, with her hair cascading over the pillow like spilled ink, and the small movement of her lips, her furled brows, showed that she was dreaming. As Ruth watched, a shade of that alien look spread like a film of water over her features, and faded.

Breathless, Ruth sank back onto her pillow, turning on her side so that she could watch the girl. So this was what it was like, the emotion she had seen in other women's faces. None of the other basic instincts had come down to man from the animals quite so uncontrolled and so primitive. Even the sexual urge had been twisted and condemned and veiled until it was barely recognizable as the simple, amoral need it once had been. Humanity had tried to turn the maternal instinct into a pretty lace-trimmed valentine too, but it had not succeeded; women who would turn sick at the sight of a dead bird could commit any kind of violence to preserve their young.

It was raining again. The soft rustle of raindrops against the window should have been soothing, but Ruth found it too suggestive of other sounds—dry fingers scratching on the glass, for instance, or small bony feet crawling along the sill. The house itself was quiet, except for one oddly soothing sound—that of Pat's resounding masculine snores from across the hall.

Ruth's mouth relaxed as she listened. She was
no expert on snoring, but she was willing to bet that Pat's efforts ranked high on any scale. She was getting almost the full effect, since all the bedroom doors were wide open. There was nothing like a haunted house to dispel artificial notions of propriety.

No sound came from Sara's room, which Bruce was now occupying, but the comforting yellow light from his door filled the hall. Ruth had found a box of old family papers in a drawer in the escritoire and Bruce had declared his intention of sitting up with them.

Ruth could remember having seen other papers in the attic. Most of them were obviously junk, the pack-rat hoarding of a fussy old lady; but she had not wanted to discard them as trash until she had time to sort through them. That time, like other hours for matters not urgently desired or needed, had never materialized. Tomorrow—no, today—she would look for them. Though their collective courage, bolstered by brandy, had taken them into the chilly living room, Ruth had flatly refused to enter the dark, gusty attic at night, and no one seemed to blame her.

Tomorrow—today, now—there would be so much to do. Yet they were groping in the dark, clutching a few tattered scraps of isolated fact, with no sign of a pattern and no promise, even, that a pattern existed. Shivering in the warm bed, Ruth faced the dismal fact that no one had yet admitted—that if Bruce's incredible notion was correct, the chances for Sara's cure were even feebler than those promised by psychiatry. The thought brought her drooping lids open and focused her eyes on her niece, searching, and fearing to find….

Sara slept peacefully now. She was young enough to look delectable when she slept, her skin flushed and damp, her lashes long and black on her smooth cheeks. Ruth lay stiff as a piece of wood. Bruce had the right idea; he wasn't even trying to sleep. Sleep was impossible, when the sense of urgency was so great. If there were only something she could do….

The sound almost lifted her bodily out of bed. The muffled crash was followed, after a second, by a faint rustling—innocent enough sounds, both of them, except for the fact that there was no one to make them. They had come from downstairs.

Bruce, in stocking feet and shirt sleeves, materialized in the doorway. He stared at her, and Ruth shook her head mutely.

“I'm going down,” he whispered.

“Not alone. Wait, Bruce—”

The sounds of imminent strangulation across the hall stopped; and a few seconds later Pat made his appearance. He was blinking and groggy; the hair stood up on his head like fire on a boulder. He too was fully dressed except for his shoes.

“Where'd it come from?” he mumbled.

“Downstairs.”

“Ummm.” Pat scratched his head. It was obvious that he was not one of those hearty people who leap, fully aware and ready for burglars, out of their warm beds. He blinked, rubbed his hands over his eyes, and came one stage nearer to consciousness. “Go down,” he said vaguely.

By that time Sara was stirring, and when she found out what had roused the others she decided to join the expedition. Bruce had long since left; he had scant patience with the weaknesses of the elderly.

The lights were still on in the living room. Leading the way down the stairs, Ruth could see Bruce bending over some object on the floor near the built-in bookcases. He straightened as she reached the foot of the stairs and came toward her, carrying the object; it seemed to be a book, bound in red leather.

Ruth stopped on the threshold of the living room. It was cold, much colder than it had been upstairs; she was shivering, even in her wool robe. Halfway across the room, Bruce stopped short. She saw the color drain from his face, saw him recoil as if he had run into some solid but invisible barrier; then her eyes turned in the direction of his wide-eyed stare, and she let out a cry of alarm.

“Something's on fire—Bruce—”

Bruce jerked as though he had been stung; the sound of her voice, or her incipient movement, into the room, roused him from his paralysis, and he came bounding toward her, his head averted and one arm up before his face. He cannoned into her, sending her staggering back; and then he turned to face the thing that had sent him into flight—the rising coil of oily black smoke which was forming in the part of the room near the window.

The cold was not the normal cold of a winter night. It rolled out of the room in unseen waves that pulled like quicksand. When Bruce pushed her back she had fancied she felt a sucking, reluctant release. The tentacles still fingered her body; she retreated farther, breathing in harsh gasps that hurt her lungs, back into the space under the stairs. She stopped only when her back touched the wall, and gave another cry as a new wave of cold touched her shrinking side. This was a more natural cold; it came from the cellar door, which was, unaccountably, wide open. Another foot to the left and she would have backed straight down the stairs in her mindless flight.

Bruce had retreated too, step by slow step, as though he were fighting a pull stronger than gravity. He came to a halt at the bottom of the stairs. Pat had seen the thing by now; Ruth heard his wordless bellow of consternation, and Sara's stifled shriek. But most of her awareness was focused on the impossible—the moving blackness that swayed to no breeze, that twisted in upon itself as if in a struggle for form. Smoke where there was no fire; greasy, oily black smoke, that emitted waves of
cold
instead of heat.

Bruce stopped at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the newel post. By accident or design his body barred the stairs, his arms extended across the narrow space from wall to bannister. He called out something, and Ruth heard the feet above stumble back, up, a few steps. The cold was sickening; it sucked at the warmth of the body like a leech. Ruth knew she was only on the fringe of its malice; the full effect was directed at Bruce.

She saw the book, still clutched in the whitened fingers of the boy's left hand, and in her bemused state she wondered, insanely, where he had found a Bible, and what good he thought it would do. Then she remembered where the thick red volume had come from; she also caught the accidentally blasphemous resemblance, in Bruce's taut body and outstretched arms, which had brought the first idea into her head. She tried to think of a prayer and finally, as her frozen brain caught up with her instinct, she realized that she had been praying, snatches of incoherent invocation from half-forgotten rituals; and she also knew that the symbols, verbal or physical, were meaningless in the face of the abyss. For the Thing moved, swaying toward them, and put out pseudopods—shapeless, wavering extensions of darkness that pawed the air like half-formed arms.

Then, through the ringing in her ears she heard a sound, as wildly incongruous as shepherd's pipes on a battlefield. It was a small sound, precise and crystalline: the sleepy twitter of a bird on a tree outside the house.

The hovering blackness began to fade.

Once the process of dissolution had begun, it proceeded rapidly; in seconds the pale blue satin drapes showed clear, unfogged, on the wall of the living room.

Through the dead silence she heard again the querulous sleepy chirp; and from Bruce came a shocking, ragged gasp of laughter.

“ ‘It faded on the crowing of the cock…' Or was that a sparrow? ‘The bird of dawning…'” And, flinging out his arm toward the door, where a streak of sickly gray sky showed through the fanlight, he sat down with a thud on the bottom step and hid his face in his folded arms.

Ruth put out one hand, as delicately as though she feared it might break off, and pushed at the open cellar door. The slam brought another alarmed bellow from Pat.

“I just closed the basement door,” she called. “It was wide open.”

She detached herself from the wall, feeling as though she must have left the imprint of her body on the plaster, and moved out to where she could see the two faces staring down over the bannister. Sara's was green.

“I'm going to be sick,” she said.

Bruce lifted his head. He was still clutching the book; one finger was jammed between the pages like a marker, and the grip of his other fingers was convulsively tight. He was shaking violently, and his face was ashen under a glistening sheen of perspiration; but his mouth was stretched in a wide, exultant grin, and his eyes went straight to Pat's face.

“By God,” he said, “how did you like
that,
you damned skeptic?”

 

II

“I'm selling the house. I won't let Sara spend another night in this chamber of horrors.”

Ruth meant every word; but she was forced to admit that Sara looked in splendid condition for a girl who had spent the night in a chamber of horrors. Slim and supple in her emerald green velvet robe, she was scrambling eggs with hungry efficiency.

“Get your hair out of the way,” Ruth added irritably. “We've had trouble enough tonight without having you catch on fire.”

“Sorry,” said Sara amiably. “Ruth, why don't you relax? I'm fine. Bruce is the one I'm worried about.”

Wrapped in a blanket and ensconced in a chair by the oven door, Bruce had almost stopped shivering. His symptoms had resembled those of shock; Pat and Ruth had had to drag him out to the warmth of the kitchen. He gave Sara a reassuring grin, but did not speak; there was a glitter in his eyes, though, that suggested he would have plenty to say when the time came.

“He needs food,” Pat said, flipping toast onto a plate. “We all do. I'm starved.”

Ruth lifted bacon out of the pan onto a paper towel, judged the coffee with an experienced eye, and began laying out silver with more speed than elegance.

“I am too. It must be the nervous strain. I remember once before when—when I was worried and upset, I ate constantly.”

“Is that what you were tonight—nervous? Personally,” said Pat, “I was terrified. Come on,

Bruce, get some of these eggs into you. That cold is incredibly enervating, and you got the worst of the blast. Hero type,” he added amiably.

“Hero, hell; I just had the farthest to run.” Bruce took a mouthful of eggs and meditated. “I wonder how many of the great heroes of history would turn out to be slow runners, if you ever investigated the circumstances.”

“Let's not be cynical,” Ruth said.

They ate in silence for a while, ravenously and with concentration. Ruth finished first; as she reached for her cigarettes she looked around the table at the other three with sudden intense affection. Pat happened to glance up as her eyes reached his face; he grinned, and echoed her thoughts with unnerving accuracy.

“ ‘Ich hatte eine Kameraden,'”
he quoted.

“How did you know what I was thinking? Yes; I know now why soldiers under fire get so devoted to their buddies.”

“There's nobody nicer than the guy who has just saved your life,” Pat agreed. “Unless it's the guy who might save it tomorrow.”

“Now you're being cynical. It's more than that.”

“It must have something to do with trust,” Sara offered shyly. “Knowing you can depend on someone, literally to the death.”

“Well, you can't depend on me.” Ruth pushed her chair back and stared at them defiantly. “I meant it. Sara is not spending another night here.”

“Surrender, hmm?”

“Pat, we're not accomplishing anything! It's getting stronger, and we're helpless. It's dangerous—horribly dangerous—”

“How do you know?” Bruce asked.

Blank silence followed. Finally Ruth said, “You're a fine one to ask that! You looked like a dead man when we pulled you out of there.”

“Another cup of coffee and he'll be his old argumentative self,” Pat said. “What happened to him was damned unpleasant, but surely it's the worst that abominable Thing can do. It's nonmaterial, after all; how much damage can It inflict?”

“Exactly.” Bruce's cheeks were flushed with excitement. “Ruth, I know how you feel. But we are making progress. Don't you realize how much we learned tonight?”